Proposed legislation in HB 71 not good for our communities

Imagine for a moment putting a bunch of teenagers in charge of guarding keys to liquor cabinets.

Mark White is Editor of The News Journal.

Chances are one of three things is going to happen.

You’re going to have several good ones, who are going to do what they are supposed to do and everything will be fine.

There are going to be a few, who will genuinely misplace the key to the liquor cabinet. This will cause big searches and lots of drama trying to find keys that shouldn’t have been lost. Sometimes things will turn out alright despite the misplaced keys. Other times, those misplaced keys are going to end up with some bad results.

Then you have the instances where the keys are “accidently misplaced,” and we have a bunch of drunk teenagers running around and the teenagers, who are charged with guarding the keys to the liquor cabinets, swear up and down that they didn’t do anything wrong and “can’t imagine what might have gone wrong.”

This seems to be a fitting analogy to begin a discussion about House Bill 71, which is currently before the Kentucky General Assembly.

House Bill 71 would allow all cities, counties, school districts and other public agencies to post their legal notices on a government website instead of in the newspaper. There is a provision that would require a small notice in a newspaper by each public agency showing the URL where a notice can be found on a government website.

There are a few problems with this bill.

First, as someone, who looks at websites and particularly government websites on a pretty regular basis, I can assure you that often times information on these websites is hard to find or can be difficult to access.

I’m just talking about the stuff that they want people to be able to access. Frequently, you will find links to positive things that are disabled or don’t work anymore. I’ll cite the example of one government website that once had a community calendar of events, which hadn’t been updated in well over a year.

If you look at some of our local government websites right now, you will find listings for government officials, who are no longer in office. They have had over a month to update this since the new officials took office.

In fairness to local governments, updating their websites and making sure that the latest information is on there is often low on their list of priorities. They usually have far more pressing concerns to deal with. I get that.

The information we are talking about here is stuff that they want people to know about.

Now imagine, if you will, a government entity, whose responsibility it is to post a critical audit of their administration on their website. How long do you think this audit link is actually going to work in many instances?

If you don’t like that example, how about posting information about bids on government projects.

Many of you would presume that elected officials would want to get this information widely disseminated. After all, more bids usually means cheaper prices that government entities pay on projects.

Good elected officials, like most of the ones we have locally, want this information to go out and be widely disseminated.

What about some of our more ethically challenged officials out there though? What about the judge-executive, who wants to direct some business fixing a road to his hunting buddy, who is a contractor? The judge-executive has the bid put up on the county’s website ever so briefly for say a few hours. Then the link for the bid suddenly stops working and isn’t fixed until a couple of hours before the bids are due. There is not enough time for a business seeing it now to put together a bid and submit it in time. Oops.

The judge-executive’s hunting buddy already has the information though. Knowing that he is probably going to be the only bidder, the judge-executive’s hunting buddy pads his bid a few thousand dollars above his usual amount.

Because no other companies knew about the bid in time to make one, the judge-executive’s hunting buddy gets the bid, and we, the taxpayers, pay out more for a project than we should have. Now imagine this happening time and time again. How long will it take before the judge-executive is talking about needing a tax increase – more of your money – to cover rising expenses, such as higher bids for building projects.

You also might have a situation where the hunting buddy contractor kicks back a few hundred dollars to the less than scrupulous judge-executive.

Fortunately, we have a good judge-executive in Whitley County, whom I don’t think would ever do anything like this. Overall, we have a really good group of elected officials period in Whitley County and our local cities right now, but they won’t be here forever. Sometimes power corrupts.

We’ve had some bad apples in the past, and eventually we’ll probably get some bad ones again in the future.

This is why you have to tailor the law to put in checks and balances to protect against potential government abuse, and one of those checks and balances is publishing legal notices in the newspaper of record in the county rather than relying solely on government websites.

I would encourage 82^nd Rep. Nick Wilson and 25^th Senator Robert Stivers to vote no on House Bill 71.